Breast pumps are well-known devices for expressing milk from the breasts of users. Breast pumps generally include a breast shield that fits over the nipple, a pump that creates a vacuum to express (or pump) milk, and a detachable container for collecting the expressed milk. However, breast pumps currently on the market consist of numerous silicone parts required to create the necessary suction for expressing milk from the breast.
Breast pumps with numerous silicone parts create difficulty in cleaning the component parts resulting in easily damaged parts during repeated milking operation. Multiple uses of such breast pumps reduces reliability, increases cost and ultimately discourages breast feeding. In addition, most prior art breast pumps comprise separate silicone parts for a diaphragm and a check valve usually in the form of a duck bill design or a flapper. A mother using a breast pump with such configuration will have to spend a lot of time and effort to rinse, wash, disinfect and clean thoroughly each of the pieces, including the separate diaphragm and the valve, in order to reliably use the breast pump for multiple milking operations. Thus, current breast pump designs can easily be damaged during repeated operations and are quite unreliable for repeated use after multiple cleaning cycles.
In addition, contamination from such unreliable breast pumps can affect the health and safety of the mother and the child. Recent studies have shown that there has been a rise in usage of breast pumps due to the increase in percentage of women in the U.S. workforce. Mothers pressed for time between home and work would rather have the convenience to use devices to pump the milk, store the milk and go back to their daily activities without the corresponding hassle of cleaning and protecting from breakage and contamination the numerous silicone parts of those breast pumps.
Therefore, there is a need for a universal breast pump device having less component parts than other conventional breast pumps currently known or used. In addition, there is a need to provide robust design of breast pump components that are not easily damaged during operation of the breast pump or after repeated usage of such device. In order to create a more robust and efficient design for a breast pump, there is a need in the art to develop a reliable breast pump with reduced number of component parts that can overcome the disadvantages of the prior art systems.